Background

A global HIV-1 vaccine will need to induce broadly reactive immune responses against conserved HIV-1 regions. It is currently unclear how best to elicit these responses by vaccination. We therefore compared the immunogenicity of a bivalent full-length HIV-1 Gag/Pol/Env mosaic vaccine, a trivalent full-length HIV-1 Gag/Pol/Env mosaic vaccine, and a bivalent mosaic vaccine containing only conserved HIV-1 Gag/Pol/Env epitopes in rhesus monkeys.

Results

There was no difference in the breadth of HIV-1-specific T lymphocyte responses elicited by the bivalent and trivalent full-length mosaic vaccines (P=.686). However, the bivalent full-length vaccine generated a greater breadth of HIV-1-specific CD8+ T lymphocyte responses than the conserved-region-only vaccine (P=.007). The bivalent full-length vaccine also generated equivalent breadth of CD8+ T lymphocyte responses to conserved HIV-1 epitopes compared to the conserved-region-only vaccine (P=1.000), and surprisingly, the responses generated by the full-length vaccine to conserved HIV-1 epitopes were greater in magnitude than those generated by the conserved-region-only vaccine (P=.008).

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Corresponding author

Correspondence to
KE Stephenson.

Rights and permissions

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.